Month: December 2015

I wanted to share with you an interesting institutionalized funding mechanism to assist on special missions and occasions.

The United Nations Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) is currently supporting more than two hundred projects in 27 countries by delivering fast, flexible and relevant funding. Countries on the agenda of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) receive funding. Countries that are not on the PBC agenda may also receive funding, following a declaration of eligibility by the Secretary-General.
The PBF allocates money through two funding facilities, the Immediate Response Facility (IRF) and the Peacebuilding Recovery Facility (PRF). Both facilities fund initiatives that respond to one or more of the following four criteria:
Respond to imminent threats to the peace process and initiatives that support peace agreements and political dialogue
Build or strengthen national capacities to promote coexistence and peaceful resolution of conflict
Stimulate economic revitalization to general peace dividends
Re-establish essential administrative services
The PBF is managed, on behalf of the United Nations Secretary-General, by the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support, supported by the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO). The UNDP Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office) is the PBF fund administrator.
The PBF relies upon voluntary contributions from Member States, organizations and individuals.

Good to see that you are checking back in with me. It has been quite some time since my last blog entry, yet the time wasn’t wasted – rather, it was spent on observing, reflecting, and formulating new thoughts on how to see peace.

This curiosity for a new concept of peace comes from the bleak score sheet when it comes to donor and diplomacy driven peace processes. If you really take a closer look at it, it seems that the prevailing discourse is to see peace as a singular event or endeavor, which takes either place on the local, small scale level (argued by many peace building scholars and the liberal haute volee of the peace building community) or it can only be achieved as a whole package, whereby the dividing notion is that to transit from ‘negative peace’ to ‘positive peace’. Developed by Johan Galtung, the ‘father’ of Peace Studies, ‘positive peace’ is the absence of structural violence, i.e. social structures with life-shortening consequences. Established in 1958, the thought has been widened 20 years later by adding a third notion, the concept of ‘cultural violence. i.e. the ideas used to legitimize both direct and structural violence. Positive peace, Galtung (1996) now argues, is the absence of both structural and cultural violence. Ironically though, even in Galtung’s ‘positive peace’, peace is defined by what it is not.

Then, we find the technocratic definitions of peace, reflected in policy papers and briefs, and squeezed into language bubbles formulated by diplomats, reducing peace to a simple equation of liberal measures and evidence-based products. Others argue that peace can only be achieved on the small scale of the local, while another cohort seeks to add peace writ large, which encompasses the state as the ultimate peace infrastructure.

With McConnell, F., & Williams, P. (Critical geographies of peace. Antipode, in press, doi:10. 1016/j.geoforum.2011.01.007), I would also like to introduce the idea of ‘peace in spaces’, i.e. how peace is differentially constructed, materialized and interpreted through space and time.

Williams and McConnell (in press) “propose a more expansive and critical focus around ‘peace-full’ concepts such as tolerance, friendship, hope, reconciliation, justice, humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism, resistance, solidarity, hospitality, care and empathy”. But do these words stand in for peace?

Especially the horrendous case of the war in Syria pushes us to think about new concepts of peace, because the old thoughts and ontologies certainly didn’t work nor yield any substantive results. Peace therefore is not just ‘not-war’, but more than that. Peace, meanwhile, can be experienced as both intimate and global. Peace can be created at an individual, family, neighborhood, community, and other scales, and using the term can foster seeing these scales as intertwined and mutually constitutive.

Thus, we need to take into account the different discourses and actions of peacemaking rather than peace building and we need to understand and invite a range of experts to allow for new thoughts on peace to be developed. Syria will need it, beyond the riff raff and Turkish bazaar style negotiations that are ensuing upon UNSCR 2254. Syria has shown us that locally negotiated peace agreements can hold and can be valid. Now it is up to the communities to take care of not falling into the ethnicity trap or Balkanization of the territory. Those working on the peacemaking front have an immense responsibility toward the dead, the displaced and the damaged but still living people to make this work, to initiate a contact group consisting of donors, allied and coalition forces and NGOS, and to bring in those facilitators who have always and will always work on the frontier of peace.

And, some reading material, if you like:

Agnew, J. (2009). Killing for cause? Geographies of war and peace. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(5), 1054e1059.